This post is about Gio Gonzalez. It says so right in the title. But to get there, we first have to talk to Dennis Eckersley, because he said something the other day that’s pertinent to what the lefty in Washington is doing right now.

Eckersley, in Oakland because the team named a gate after him, was relaxing before a game. We were talking about changes in the sport, and I asked him why his strikeout rate peaked in 1992, at a point when he was 38 years old and had been a reliever for five years. Was it a new pitch? Grip? Approach?

Nope.

“Everyone started chasing, just like now,” the legendary reliever said that day. “You punch out 200 guys now, it’s not a big deal. Everyone is striking out a guy an inning. You tell me why. First of all, they’re throwing harder. I get that. But no one puts down their hack. These 2-2 swings… they’re, like, crazy.”

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With the spread throughout baseball of wearable technology — that is, devices like the Zephyr Bioharness which are capable of capturing all manner of physiological data — it’s tempting to consider everything that teams and players could possibly extract from the information that’s gathered.

While such technology is currently used to monitor mostly fatigue and workload via calorie consumption — noted foodie Russell Martin employed the Bioharness in Pittsburgh to better understand how much he could eat without gaining weight — there are certainly other possible areas for innovation. Like, what more can we learn from heart rate in the midst of performance? Could we better understand performance under stress? How emotions influence play?

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The Yankees bullpen is short on neither talent nor name value. Most baseball fans are aware of Aroldis Chapman, even if they’re not aware that he’s been in a funk. Likewise, many baseball fans are aware of Dellin Betances, and they’ve generally heard of David Robertson, who this year has re-emerged as terrific. To make the unit all the more deep, the Yankees acquired Tommy Kahnle, one of the year’s big bullpen breakout stories. Kahnle has struck out 38% of his opponents, ranking him seventh in baseball among regular or semi-regular relievers.

Kahnle, in the breakout sense, is a surprise. He finally has the results to go with the powerful stuff. And yet Kahnle may play second fiddle in here, because of another development. The highest strikeout rate for any reliever belongs to Craig Kimbrel. Well, sure. In second place, we find Kenley Jansen. Yes, of course. The name in third place reads “Chad Green.” And he’s up around 60 innings, so this isn’t just a hot week or month. Green has piled up the strikeouts, and as a consequence, he ranks seventh among all relievers in WAR. Chad Green made his season debut on May 9.

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Ben Lindbergh and Jeff Sullivan banter about their Hurricane Harvey relief raffle’s status, hot and cold teams, Trevor Bauer’s run-in with Avisail Garcia, and evolving pitch-selection in the major leagues, then talk to EW listener Max Schleicher about his fan-sentiment-based study on the best and worst big-league ballparks (and big-league-ballpark amenities).

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Yesterday, the Diamondbacks throttled the best team in baseball, winning by 13 runs. Last Thursday, they beat the same team by seven runs. Wednesday, they beat them by two; Tuesday, they beat them by one. Before that series, the Diamondbacks swept the Giants, and took three of four from the Mets. Between the last two series against the Dodgers, the Diamondbacks swept the Rockies, and they did so on the road. In all, the Diamondbacks have won 11 in a row, and 13 of 14. A playoff position that was once in some doubt has now been effectively sealed.

It’s certainly true that the Diamondbacks aren’t this good. No team is this good, because no team has ever been this good, because no team could ever be this good. Every team looks perfect when it’s riding a winning streak, and winning streaks end. Heck, from June 28 until the start of this run, the Diamondbacks went 17-29. That’s bad! But that’s why you always need to look at the bigger picture. The Diamondbacks have baseball’s fifth-best winning percentage. They have baseball’s sixth-best BaseRuns estimated winning percentage. This team is good, and better than it was expected to be. Let’s think about that for a few minutes.

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There have been 23 perfect games in major-league history but only 18 four-homer games.

While we’d expect to see the quantity of the latter increase during a home-run spike like the one baseball is currently experiencing, the four-homer game remains one of the rarest individual, single-game achievements of which a player is capable. Perhaps the only rarer deeds are the 20-strikeout game (accomplished five times) and unassisted triple play (recorded 15 times in major-league history).

J.D. Martinez, as you’re probably aware, became the 18th player to produce a four-homer game this Monday. He became just the third one to reach the mark against four different pitchers.

Only six players have hit four homers in a game since the start of the 21st century. Mike Cameron (May 2, 2002), Shawn Green (May 23, 2002), Carlos Delgado (Sept. 25, 2003), Josh Hamilton (May 8, 2012), and Scooter Gennett (June 6 of this year) represent the other five. While Gennett is the unlikeliest player in the modern era to accomplish the feat, Martinez is also an unlikely candidate — if you account for the unusual path he’s taken to stardom.

More immediately, the four-homer game renders even more puzzling the lack of interest in Martinez’s services at the deadline — and, perhaps, helps his case en route to the free-agent market, hinting that this is a hitter who’s still improving.

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Last night, the Diamondbacks beat the Dodgers 13-0 to record their 11th consecutive victory. Now 80-58, Arizona has effectively wrapped a Wild Card berth, and given how they are playing, everyone else in the NL has to be hoping they lose that play-in game. Because they look formidable right now.

But as good as the Diamondbacks look, the Dodgers look equally bad. Last night’s drubbing was their fourth loss in a row and their ninth loss in their last 10 games. If it wasn’t for Clayton Kershaw returning to throw zeroes at the Padres on Friday night, in a game the Dodgers won just 1-0 over one of the worst teams in baseball, they’d be staring at a 10 game losing streak. And it’s not like they’re just playing well but losing close games due to some bad fortune. During this 10 game slide, the Dodgers have played like a team that deserved to get beat every night.

Since August 26th, the Dodgers 57 wRC+ is the worst in the Majors. They are hitting .201/.267/.320 thanks to a combination of the third-highest strikeout rate and the second-lowest ISO. Over this span of 10 games, their offense has been 20 runs worse than the average line-up.

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This is Mike Hattery’s first piece as part of his September residency at FanGraphs. Hattery writes for the Cleveland-based site Waiting for Next Year. He can also be found on Twitter. Read the work of all our residents here.

While there are certainly examples to the contrary, it’s generally the case that outlets such as Baseball Prospectus and this esteemed institution approach their analytical work on an individual player in the context of that player’s value to his team. Since most writers begin as fans, and because fandom in baseball — and, ultimately, most sports — tends to begin with an allegiance to a city or team, this isn’t surprising.

For the actual major-league clubs, this imbalance is naturally even more pronounced. All 30 organizations feature an analytics department of some sort, and all 30 of those departments are constructed ultimately to benefit the team. Even in those instances, for example, where an observation about spin rate aids an individual pitcher, the added value is ultimately passed on to the club.

And here we arrive at a point of concern: while analytical work in baseball offers tremendous insight and can even benefit individual players, it appears that organizations have a significant advantage over players in their access to data and their capacity to use that data in decision making.

Now, if this analytical work were limited merely to assessing player value or estimating the possible range of a player’s outcomes, the informational asymmetry would represent less of a concern. However, as teams and public analysts continue their pursuit in the direction of health-risk modeling, the impact on players is increasingly serious.

In a recent piece illuminating the information gap between teams and agents, R.J. Anderson wrote the following:

The ongoing data revolution has obscured a simple fact. With teams receiving improved information, their greatest competitive advantage is perhaps no longer over one another. Rather, the information gulf now resides between the teams and the players — or, precisely, the players’ agents. With the league investing in new data sources, like Statcast, the gap could continue to grow.

Of most concern, perhaps, is that player agents are guaranteed no greater access to data than the common fan by the terms of the 2017-2021 MLB Collective Bargaining Agreement. Teams, meanwhile, are afforded extensive access to additional data gathered by Statcast technology.

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When Seattle selected JP Sears 333rd overall in this year’s draft, they knew they were getting a pitcher with a propensity for punch outs. In his junior season at The Citadel, the 21-year-old left-hander fanned 142 batters — the most in Division I baseball — in 95.1 innings. What they couldn’t possibly have known was that his strikeout rate would rise once he got to pro ball.

In 17 relief appearances between short-season Everett and Low-A Clinton, the 11th-round pick struck out — drum roll, please — a staggering 51 batters in 27.2 innings. He also allowed just 13 hits and two earned runs.

You can’t hit what you can’t see, and according to Clinton Lumber Kings pitching coach Doug Mathis, that’s the secret to the southpaw’s success.

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